Rancher's Double Dilemma Read online

  “How about coming upstairs to meet Ashley?”

  Lacey discovered her palms had gone damp for no reason. She wiped them on the dish towel she held, then followed Garth up the stairs, trying not to admire the working of his haunches under his jeans.

  He led the way to the nursery. From the looks of the toy basket, Ashley Colquitt must have had every toy known to man and baby.

  Garth went to the playpen and picked up his daughter. “This,” he said, “is Ashley. Ashley, meet your new nanny.”

  Lacey opened her mouth to say something, but as soon as she saw Ashley’s face, she could not speak a word. Her knees grew weak with shock.

  The soft golden hair, the gray eyes, the curve of the cheek and the little pointed chin—they were the exact duplicate of her own baby, Michelle’s.

  Dear Reader,

  Welcome to Harlequin American Romance, where our goal is to give you hours of unbeatable reading pleasure.

  Kick starting the month is another enthralling installment of THE CARRADIGNES: AMERICAN ROYALTY continuity series. In Michele Dunaway’s The Simply Scandalous Princess, rumors of a tryst between Princess Lucia Carradigne and a sexy older man leads to the king issuing a royal marriage decree! Follow the series next month in Harlequin Intrigue.

  Another terrific romance from Pamela Browning is in store for you with Rancher’s Double Dilemma. When single dad Garth Colquitt took one look at his new nanny’s adorable baby girl, he knew there had to be some kind of crazy mixup, because his daughter and her daughter were twins! Was a marriage of convenience the solution? Next, don’t miss Help Wanted: Husband? by Darlene Scarlera. When a single mother-to-be hires a handsome ranch hand, she only has business on her mind. Yet, before long, she wonders if he was just the man she needed—to heal her heart. And rounding out the month is Leah Vale’s irresistible debut novel The Rich Man’s Baby, in which a dashing tycoon discovers he has a son, but the proud mother of his child refuses to let him claim them for his own…unless love enters the equation.

  This month, and every month, come home to Harlequin American Romance—and enjoy!

  Best,

  Melissa Jeglinski

  Associate Senior Editor

  Harlequin American Romance

  RANCHER’S DOUBLE DILEMMA

  Pamela Browning

  This book is dedicated to parents of twins, who deserve a double halo.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Pamela Browning has been fascinated by twins ever since she first met her imaginary playmates, Marilyn and Carolyn, when she was two years old. These twin girls were accompanied everywhere by their twin pets, the Red Lion and the White Lion.

  Unfortunately, Pam never wrote a book about either of these sets of twins, but she’s not at all surprised that the twin babies in this book bear a striking resemblance to—you guessed it—Marilyn and Carolyn.

  Books by Pamela Browning

  HARLEQUIN AMERICAN ROMANCE

  101—CHERISHED BEGINNINGS

  116—HANDYMAN SPECIAL

  123—THROUGH THE EYES OF LOVE

  131—INTERIOR DESIGNS

  140—EVER SINCE EVE

  150—FOREVER IS A LONG TIME

  170—TO TOUCH THE STARS

  181—FLUTTERBY PRINCESS

  194—ICE CRYSTALS

  227—KISSES IN THE RAIN

  237—SIMPLE GIFTS

  241—FLY AWAY

  245—HARVEST HOME

  287—FEATHERS IN THE WIND

  297—UNTIL SPRING

  354—HUMBLE PIE

  384—A MAN WORTH LOVING

  420—FOR AULD LANG SYNE

  439—SUNSHINE AND SHADOWS

  451—MORGAN’S CHILD

  516—MERRY CHRISTMAS, BABY

  565—THE WORLD’S LAST BACHELOR

  600—ANGEL’S BABY

  632—LOVER’S LEAP

  788—RSVP…BABY

  818—THAT’S OUR BABY!

  854—BABY CHRISTMAS

  874—COWBOY WITH A SECRET

  907—PREGNANT AND INCOGNITO

  922—RANCHER’S DOUBLE DILEMMA

  Lacey’s Things To Do list:

  Ask your new boss, Garth Colquitt,

  if you can introduce the girls

  to all the animals on his ranch.

  Make sure flaky ex-husband

  doesn’t come near town.

  Ask someone why a mule

  is the mayor of the town.

  Don’t tell Garth that

  his daughter is really your

  other daughter’s missing twin!

  Hide the fact that you have

  a crush on your sexy boss!

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  Lacey’s Lasagna

  Chapter One

  The first thing Lacey Shaw spotted when she drove her Winnebago into Mosquito, Texas, was a mule strolling down the middle of the road, lazy as you please. Nobody seemed to notice. Nobody seemed to care.

  The second thing she saw was a drugstore, which was a good thing because Michele was sitting soggy in her last Huggies, and Lacey had it in her mind to buy a big box of disposable diapers. Ten months of motherhood had taught Lacey several important truths, among them that running out of disposable diapers was the pits.

  She rolled the Winnebago into a parking space outside the drugstore and eased Michele out of her child seat. “Come on, sweetie, we’ll have you dry in no time.” Michele babbled something agreeable and focused wide gray eyes, so like Lacey’s own, on her mother’s face. Besides being adorable with that fluff of golden hair, chubby cheeks and a cute pointed chin, Michele was a good baby. She hardly ever spit up, and she almost never fussed. She didn’t even mind wet diapers.

  Lacey had been born with an overabundance of natural curiosity and couldn’t help wondering about that mule. In the drugstore she gathered her purchases, and on the way out she asked the cashier why the mule was allowed to wander.

  “Oh, that’s Horace,” the checkout girl said dismissively. “He goes just about anywhere he wants. He does anything he wants to do.”

  “Um,” said Lacey, hoisting Michele onto her hip and slipping her arm through the holes in the bag containing the box of diapers, a new lip liner and a copy of the local newspaper that she had picked up off the counter. “Isn’t it kind of dangerous? For a mule to be wandering around in the middle of the road? Don’t they have laws here that require people to keep their livestock penned up?”

  “Oh, well,” the clerk said. She wore big-framed glasses and a smock embroidered with the name Mary Lou. “If Horace was any old cow or something, he’d have to stay on a ranch, I guess. But he’s the mayor.”

  Lacey didn’t think she had heard correctly. But before she could ask what in the world Mary Lou was talking about, a woman in a brightly flowered dress swooped down upon her and poked her face right into Michele’s.

  “My, how you’ve grown since the last time I saw you,” she crooned, chucking Michele under the chin. She pursed her lips as she studied Lacey. “Well, I must say, I’m delighted that Garth Colquitt has found himself a new nanny.” She didn’t look delighted. She looked critical, as if she’d never seen a person wearing a hot-pink T-shirt that stopped short above the waist and cutoff jeans with embroidered flowers and rhinestones. Lacey had embroidered those flowers and stuck on those rhinestones herself, and she was proud of her handiwork, besides which she did
n’t think this woman, who was shaped like an egg with arms and legs sticking out, had all that much to be critical about.

  So she said politely, “Excuse me?”

  “It’s such a comfort to Garth to have a little girl, and after dear Joanie thought she’d never have a living child, too. All those miscarriages, you know. Poor Joanie, and poor Garth. Now if you need anything, anything at all, you call me, okay? Francelle Spurlin. The Big Bar Seven, right down the road from you. Those Colquitt men can be a handful, can’t they? Though they are right good-looking, if you ask me. And nice people, real nice.”

  Having said that, she rushed out the door. Lacey, whose jaw seemed to have sprung its hinges, turned to ask Mary Lou who the woman was and what she had been referring to, but by this time Mary Lou was checking out another customer and chattering a mile a minute. So Lacey moved on out the door. When she got outside, she looked around for the flowered dress, but it was nowhere to be seen. Neither was the mule.

  “Well, Michele,” Lacey said to her baby as she set her down on her changing table in the Winnebago, “Mosquito, Texas, is kind of a different place, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Ba-ba-ba,” said Michele, which was as intelligent a thing about the matter as Lacey could have said herself.

  But even a mule as mayor couldn’t make Lacey forget the sad task that had drawn her back to this small town.

  “As I recall,” she said to Michele as they were driving out of the parking lot, “the cemetery isn’t too far from the center of town.” And she was right. The cemetery was located down a quiet side street on the other side of an arched iron grille into which the words Peaceful Gardens had been elaborately scrolled. Lacey thought that when the time came, she wouldn’t mind being buried in such a place. The name conjured up images of graceful swans floating on a tranquil pond overhung with willow trees. It made her think of fragrant breezes and maybe being stroked with a feather.

  Not that you could stroke the dead with a feather or would want to. But the images of swans and willow trees stuck in her mind while she searched for the place where her first-born child, Michele’s identical twin sister, had been buried ten months ago.

  She found the tiny grave without a whole lot of trouble. Bunny, her ex-husband, had described it as in a corner of the cemetery sheltered by a huge oak tree. And yes, there it was, the shiny new bronze marker gleaming in the sun. It was that marker that had drawn Lacey back to Mosquito, Texas, a place she’d thought she never wanted to see again as long as she lived. But she’d had to come, once she knew the marker was in place. Maybe after she saw it, she’d believe her baby was really dead.

  “You should be happy you’ve got one strong healthy baby,” Bunny had said as they’d ridden out of Mosquito on that sorrowful morning ten months ago. “Stop weeping and wailing about the one that’s lost.” Bunny wasn’t strong on compassion, but lordy, he did look good in a pair of jeans.

  Well, the marriage hadn’t lasted, and considering Bunny’s complete lack of understanding, maybe it was just as well. She and Michele were doing fine on their own, the most pressing problem being lack of funds. That could be remedied, though. The problem of putting up with a rotten husband couldn’t. Lacey felt a whole lot better now that she was free of Bunny.

  Lacey drew the Winnebago to a stop in Peaceful Gardens, under the spreading branches of the oak tree. “Here we are, honey,” she said to the baby, who grinned and reached for the bottle Lacey handed her. “Now you sit tight and drink your juice. I’ll be but a minute.”

  When Lacey slipped down from the seat of the Winnebago, she had tears in her eyes. She’d never seen her first-born baby’s grave before. From the looks of things, the sun would shine on it almost all day long, a fact that uplifted her considerably. A border of alternating pink and white flowers danced along the nearby fence, and it was real pretty.

  Lacey wiped away her tears with one hand and went and picked some of the flowers to put in the provided vase beside the marker. She looked around for a nearby water spigot and saw one near a large family plot. Colquitt, the big marker inside the fence said. Wasn’t that the name of the man that the lady in the flowered dress had mentioned? Garth Colquitt? She moved closer for a better look at the newly engraved letters on the solid granite headstone.

  “Joan Haynes Colquitt, beloved wife of Garth Colquitt, devoted mother of Ashley Anne.” The date of death was only a month after Lacey’s own daughter had died.

  The lady in the flowered dress had mistaken Lacey for Garth Colquitt’s nanny. Well, no wonder Garth Colquitt needed a nanny. His wife had died. She must have left a baby, the Ashley Anne mentioned on the headstone. The thought made Lacey sad, and she had no wish whatever to be more gloomy than she already was, so she forced herself to return to the business at hand, which was putting flowers on her child’s grave.

  After she arranged the flowers nicely, Lacey set the vase in its holder beside the marker. All the marker said was Baby Shaw, and it gave a date of birth and of death, which happened to be the same. Baby Shaw had lived only a few minutes, they’d said. Lacey had never even held Baby Shaw in her arms.

  It was a pretty day in the early part of May, clear and bright, with sunlight glimmering all dappled and green through the shiny green leaves above. Lacey sat down on a nearby bench to think for a moment. In a way it set her mind at ease to see the grave with the marker. In a way it didn’t. Seeing the marker, knowing it was there, made it seem so much more real that she had lost the baby. In her heart of hearts, she hadn’t wanted to believe that her baby had really died. But now she’d have to.

  Lacey wished she wouldn’t keep having flashbacks to that night in the delivery room, the bright lights, the urgency of her delivery. She remembered one baby being born, then another. Two babies crying, then only one. Since that night Lacey had been haunted by snippets of memories, whispers of dreams. She’d been overwhelmed by nightmares of her lost baby crying to be held.

  Well, maybe she wouldn’t have those bad dreams anymore, now that she had seen the grave and the marker.

  When a few more minutes had passed, Lacey blew her nose and went to get Michele out of the Winnebago. She talked to Michele as she carried her across the grass to the bench.

  “This is a nice place, isn’t it, Michele? I think we’ll take some time to enjoy it. Come to think of it, maybe I could find work here in Mosquito. I can’t help but like the kind of town where a mule is the mayor. I’ve lived in quite a few towns in the past where the mayor acted like a mule, all right. Maybe this is better.”

  She plunked Michele down on the thick green grass beside the bench. Michele had recently learned to crawl, and she set off delightedly toward the bronze marker. Lacey immediately got up and hauled her back. “You leave those flowers alone,” she cautioned. “They’re for your sister.”

  Lacey talked to her baby a lot. Now that she and Bunny were divorced, she was especially grateful for Michele, because without her surviving child, Lacey would be almost completely alone in the world. Almost completely, because Lacey’s mother, Sheila Sue, had picked up and moved to Florida with a sugar daddy she’d met in the restaurant where she and Lacey had both waited tables. Sheila Sue, by virtue of her happy marriage to Fletcher Holland III, would never have to work again as long as she lived.

  But that didn’t help Lacey much, though her mother had sent cash to help her divorce Bunny. It had been money well spent, but at this point, Lacey knew she’d better get a job, and soon. She was down to her last several bucks since Bunny had shown up in that ugly blue pickup of his one night and, making use of his keys to the Winnebago, crept in and filched money from her purse. He was still hacked that she’d been awarded the motor home in the divorce settlement, Lacey guessed, but other than her own collection of Fiesta Ware dishes, that was pretty much the only thing of value that she’d ended up with, since neither she nor Bunny had much to begin with.

  “Well, never put off till tomorrow what you can do today,” Lacey said out loud, because that’s what She
ila Sue, who could come up with a proverb to cover every situation, would have said. Keeping a sharp eye on Michele, Lacey went back to the Winnebago and brought the newspaper over to the bench. She dug a pencil out of her jeans pocket and started to mark Help Wanted ads.

  There was one for a waitress at the Coffee Cup, a dingy little diner in the middle of the block in Mosquito’s downtown district, which was about two blocks long. “I can’t take that job,” she told Michele, who sat beside her feet performing her latest trick of blowing bubbles through pursed lips. “I don’t know who I’d get to take care of you.” She circled the ad anyway in case she needed to come back to it.

  Lacey moved her finger on down the column. There weren’t all that many ads in the Mosquito Messenger. The ideal situation would be to find a day-care center that could use some help, since Lacey had worked in a succession of them since the divorce. Working in a day-care center meant that Michele could be with her all day.

  “If you want to work in a day-care center,” her mother had said a week ago when they’d talked, “why don’t you come to Florida and work for my neighbor? She owns a whole chain of day-care centers. She’s always looking for competent help, and you’re experienced. Why, you could even work your way up to manager, or maybe even better. She has a handsome son, too. You’d like him.”

  Lacey didn’t want to tell her mother that she couldn’t afford to drive the gas-guzzling Winnebago all the way to Florida, nor did she want to meet the neighbor’s son. Sheila Sue would have advanced her the money for the trip, but Lacey had already borrowed enough from her. And besides, Lacey liked Texas. She was a native-born Texan and proud of it.

  But, unfortunately, there were no ads for day-care places in the Mosquito Messenger. There was, however, a big ad, all in capital letters, headed Nanny Wanted.

  “Rancher needs nanny immediately for one baby girl. Light housekeeping, room and board. Apply at Colquitt Ranch, Old Grange Road. Garth Colquitt.”